First Post of The Year

(14-40mm at 26mm, f4, Canon 40D)

So here comes 2009! Let's hope it's a good one...

And for my photographic resolution for the new year: get out of the studio and take more environmental, conceptual portraits.

So with that in mind, I went out with Prin who's like my go-to person when I feel like shooting someone, anyone.

.... turns out it was a miserable day - windy, cold, gloomy and foggy and Prin lost her glasses. Beh!

Alright lets get right down to the diagram...



It's basically a one light setup, pretty simple stuff... y'all should be able to do it.

Light A: This is our key light, it's placed roughly 150 million km away from our model and has a diameter of 1391980 km but keep in mind that because it's so far away, the effective size is rather small making it a very harsh light.

Diffuser: To soften Light A, I called upon (by chanting) the service of a humongous diffuser made of water vapor which did a pretty good job of spreading the light out and almost eliminating all shadows.

With a setup like this one, the photograph pretty much takes itself. Reflectors are generally useless as the light is already quite soft and there are no shadows to fill. All that's left to do is to find the right composition and the right pose.

One thing to be aware of: the sky. It's gray, it's ugly and it's going to mess up your in-camera meter. Try to expose for the sky and you will end up with the model being too dark. Try to expose for the model and you'll end up with an overblown sky. You can either add a flash with the ability to do high speed syncing or you can just not include it in your composition. I opted for the latter as I did not get the former in my stocking this Christmas :(

-TN

Update: Please note that this kind of light usually results in negatives that are flat and lack contrast but that's O.K because contrast is something that's very easy to add in Photoshop! Which is what I did. I also added some warmth to the photograph and slightly desaturated all cool colours.